Motivational Quotes

Government

It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.

- Gardner, John W.

Best Quotes about Government

It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state.

Galbraith, John Kenneth

Congress is so strange. A man gets up to speak and says nothing. Nobody listens, then everybody disagrees.

Marshalov, Boris

So they [the Government] go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.

Sir Winston Churchill

Good government is the outcome of private virtue.

Chapman, John Jay

The government can destroy wealth but it cannot create wealth, which is the product of labor and management working with creation.

Murray, Bill

We have the best government that money can buy.

Twain, Mark

Governments need to have both shepherds and butchers.

Voltaire

Governing today means giving acceptable signs of credibility. It is like advertising and it is the same effect that is achieved -- commitment to a scenario.

Baudrillard, Jean

An educated people can be easily governed.

Frederick The Great, (Frederick II)

10.

There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate government action.

Russell, Bertrand

11.

As long as our government is administered for the good of the people, and is regulated by their will; as long as it secures to us the rights of persons and of property, liberty of conscience and of the press, it will be worth defending.

Jackson, Andrew

12.

Society is well governed when its people obey the magistrates, and the magistrates obey the law.

Solon

13.

The art of government is not to let me grow stale.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

14.

Large legislative bodies resolve themselves into coteries, and coteries into jealousies.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

15.

Those who govern, having much business on their hands, do not generally like to take the trouble of considering and carrying into execution new projects. The best public measures are therefore seldom adopted from previous wisdom, but forced by the occasion.

Franklin, Benjamin

16.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Humboldt, Karl Wilhelm Von

17.

To govern is to choose. To appear to be unable to choose is to appear to be unable to govern.

Lawson, Nigel

18.

Nothing is more surprising than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.

Hume, David

19.

The whole duty of government is to prevent crime and to preserve contracts.

Melbourne, Lord

20.

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

John Kenneth Galbraith

21.

The greater the hold of government upon the life of the individual citizen, the greater the risk of war.

Hospers, John

22.

Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society, and made by the legislative power vested in it; a liberty to follow my own will in all things, when the rule prescribes not, and not to be subject to the inconstant, unknown, arbitrary will of another man.

Locke, John

23.

But their determination to banish fools foundered ultimately in the installation of absolute idiots.

Bunting, Basil

24.

Sure there are dishonest men in local government. But there are dishonest men in national government too.

Richard M. Nixon

25.

When our government is spoken of as some menacing, threatening, foreign entity, it ignores the fact that in our democracy, government is us.

President Barack Obama

26.

Office without pay makes thieves.

Proverb, German

27.

In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going, and in this consciousness of being indispensable every administrator finds the chief reward of his labor and efforts. While the sea of history remains calm the ruler-administrator in his frail bark, holding on with a boat hook to the ship of the people and himself moving, naturally imagines that his efforts move the ship he is holding on to. But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible. The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.

Tolstoy, Count Leo

28.

I don't judge a regime by the damning criticism of the opposition, but by the ingenuous praise of the partisan.

Rostand, Jean

29.

The supply of government exceeds demand.

Lapham, Lewis H.

30.

Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them.

Reagan, Ronald

31.

Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. [The Motto Of The U.S. Postal Service]

Herodotus

32.

No man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest; yet everyone thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.

Socrates

33.

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office.

H. L. Mencken

34.

The best government is that which teaches us to govern ourselves.

Goethe, Johann Wolfgang Von

35.

Believe me - the Government will help you anytime it needs you.

Kocher, Gerhard

36.

That state is best ordered when the wicked have no command, and the good have.

Pittacus

37.

Public instruction should be the first object of government.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

38.

It is doubtful that the government knows much more than the public does about how government [Economic] policies will work.

Wallis, W. Allen

39.

Government can be bigger than any of the players on the field as a referee, but it has no right to become one of the players.

Igleheart, Austin

40.

We must judge a government by its general tendencies and not by its happy accidents.

Macaulay, Thomas B.

41.

I love my government not least for the extent to which it leaves me alone.

Updike, John

42.

Government is an evil; it is only the thoughtlessness and vices of men that make it a necessary evil. When all men are good and wise, government will of itself decay.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe

43.

Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

Bastiat, Frederic

44.

To administer is to govern: to govern is to reign. That is the essence of the problem.

Mirabeau, Comte De

45.

To rule is not so much a question of the heavy hand as the firm seat.

Gasset, Jose Ortega Y

46.

Of the best rulers, The people only know that they exist; the next best they love and praise the next they fear; and the next they revile. When they do not command the people's faith, some will lose faith in them, and then they resort to oaths! But of the best when their task is accomplished, their work done, the people all remark, We have done it ourselves.

Lao-Tzu

47.

No government is safe unless fortified by goodwill.

Nepos, Cornelius

48.

Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.

Jefferson, Thomas

49.

A government must not waiver once it has chosen it's course. It must not look to the left or right but go forward.

Bismarck, Otto Von

50.

I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of government rather than another. It is of no moment to the happiness of an individual.

Johnson, Samuel